Film critic Shawn Levy's Christmas choices

"The Nightmare Before Christmas""It's a Wonderful Life" is the oldest film on my Christmas favorites list, a certified holiday classic that actually has very little to do with Christmas. It is more effective as a vision of the American dream as a walk along a razor's edge than as a paean to the glories of home, hearth and holiday cheer. Yes, the climax is set at Christmas, but the film takes place throughout the year, and its most memorable sequence -- George Bailey's nightmare vision of a world without him -- has nothing to do with holiday sentiment and everything to do with ordinary human fear. "Bad Santa" is completely devoid of sentiment for the holiday -- even with a knowingly phony happy-yule ending. This irredeemably filthy and hilarious picture answers a question most of us don't have the guts to ask -- namely, what type of person works as a department store Santa? It's a film so acid and raw that it's hard to believe it even got made, and it's filled with shocking lines and moments that honestly kill me every time. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" ratchets back the bile considerably. I think there's a credible case to be made for Henry Selick's movie as the best having to do with two holidays -- the other being Halloween. Semi-operatic, wildly imaginative, emotionally rich without being sentimental, exquisitely handmade -- it's a world unto itself, and it gets at the creepiness of the Santa Claus myth without quite overturning it.

"A Christmas Tale," another mythbuster, is the sprawling family drama by Arnaud Desplechin, a writer-director for whom nothing seems impossible to include in a film -- which, let's face it, is also true of life. In this remarkable movie, a grudging family reunion forces issues of blood heritage to the surface in painful and disarming fashion, all within the context of gorgeous craft and sharp acting. "A Christmas Story" may not have the fine technique, but the writing (by Jean Shepherd, who narrates in his butterscotch radio voice) is sublime, and Bob Clark's film nicely balances the childhood fantasy of Christmas-as-magic with the adult reality of Christmas-as-extra-work-and-expense. "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story," too, balances the dream of Christmas with the harder realities of the season, and its moments of corn are leavened by a sense that real emotions must be hard-earned. The 1971 made-for-TV film served as the pilot for the long-running series "The Waltons." With a cast that's crucially different from the familiar faces (Patricia Neal, Andrew Duggan and Edgar Bergen were all later replaced), with a quietly ominous undertone, with a resolution that satisfies without being pat, it's exemplary Christmas entertainment that, likely, hasn't been watched to death at your house over the years.